Re: delta early days

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.980429130713.14454A-100000@terra> ,
    "Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@sarnoff.com>  writes:
> Worldwide I believe UDEL was the only installation of Plato 
> outside U. Illinois -- 'nough said. 

I do remember being quite impressed by the notes system on PLATO.  It
was pretty cool to see messages from people in Illinois.  A
predecessor of usenet and internet mail in some sense I suppose.  One
other thing I remember about PLATO was when we got our tour of the
machine room that one summer.  I was impressed by the size of the
machine and the large number of blinking lights indicating network
activity between UDel and UI.  PLATO had some other cool technology
for the time: touch screens, the ability to download code into the
terminals (they weren't just dumb terminals but full microcomputers
with what amounted to a network connection to the PLATO mainframe),
and the ability of the machines to play computer generated music as
well as do phoneme-based voice synthesis.  They seemed especially well
suited to playing Bach. :)  I recall that Phil Bernosky was pretty
involved with PLATO and tutor programming because of his interest in
music.
--
                                               Rich Thomson
                                               rthomson@ptc.com